Paniq Room: Supercell 117

After having tried Paniq Room’s Sen3es room and loving it, we caught up with our escape room buddies (five adults) to try Supercell 117. This was our 12th escape room (and my 9th Sydney room). In summary, this is an excellent well designed room. We all had loads of fun despite our initial trepidation about being blindfolded and handcuffed! We were so pumped at doing this that we were keen to try the last room (Abandoned Military Bunker on the Rocks) straight away, but it was booked out for the rest of the day (we’ll be back!).

Theme

From their website:

You find yourselves in a cell hand-cuffed and blindfolded, with stifling smoke. You have no idea how you got there. You are locked away from each other at the beginning in 2 separate neighbouring cells, and the situation is not looking good at all. One thing you know for sure: you have to get out in 60 min! Would you save your own life only, or would you care for your TEAM as well? If you wanna make it you should work as one TEAM! The choice is yours, but time is running out, and the guards are arriving soon.

This room had a great design with strong theming throughout the room. The theme is based on a modern day prison. There were quite a number of props (including some red herrings) but the props and the puzzles all fitted really well into the theme. It was quite an immersive experience, with a very good flow through the puzzles and storyline.

Game breakdown

We arrived in the reception and got our briefing and backstory from our friendly game host. We were told that our teams will be separated but the goal is to escape our cells and the prison. Our team was split into two groups, handcuffed and then blindfolded. You could sense the trepidation in some of our teammates, but we were all keen to give it a good go. We were then led into the cells and then told to take off our blindfolds.

Our blindfolds quickly came off and we discovered that we were in the dark. We started feeling our way around, yelling anything interesting that we came across. Once we got a bit of light happening, the pace kept going.

The puzzles are a mix of low and high tech puzzles and an enjoyable level of difficulty. It’s a linear progression (you’ll need to find each clue to get to the next ‘stage’). I really enjoyed the diversity of puzzles and there was a particularly challenging puzzle that I needed two hints to get through it! This room definitely requires good teamwork and good communication. You cannot get through it by yourself.

The game hosts constantly monitor your progress throughout the game. Instead of asking for hints, hints are automatically provided through a dumb waiter if they feel that you’re going off course. While this is great to keep the pace going (particularly if teams get stuck and can’t progress), I felt that there were a couple of hints that were provided too early in our situation. There was definitely two hints provided that I needed, but the other three hints were things that other team members were working on and close to cracking. I guess we could have left the hints and not looked at it, but as we were working on puzzles in parallel, it was tricky to know what hints to read and what to leave. Maybe this can be addressed by getting a nominated person to ask for a hint (this is a system that I’ve seen used elsewhere and it works quite well).

On the whole, our team really enjoyed the experience. It is an excellent high quality room and highly recommended. We had so much fun! We can’t wait to try the last room.

About Paniq Room

Paniq Room is based in the lovely historical area of Sydney known as ‘The Rocks’. It can be a bit tricky to find but the place is signposted. If you get there a bit early, take time to wander around the area. There’s some lovely historical things to see in the region and lots of good places to eat. If you go on the weekend, there are also The Rocks Markets where you can see many local designers selling their wares.